Five Quick and Easy Dinner Meals

The most dreaded question I think a mom (or dad) can get in the evening is "What's for dinner?" For those who are working parents and come home to kids, husband or wife, laundry to still be done, some housecleaning that is taunting you and the dreaded dinner question can just put one over the edge. Unless you keep some quick and easy dinner recipes on hand, favorites of your family, just for those nights that you want to fix it up, dish it out and get them off to homework and evening with the family or bed!

I love to cook, but very often we do not have everyone coming in at the same time in the evenings. We do try to eat dinner together a few days a week and that means in order to have supper served hot for everyone, I have had to learn how to fix some meals up in a half hour or an hour or less, at times. That way when everyone is finally all in the house together, we can sit down and actually EAT together. To us just those simple times, a family meal eaten together, has kept us as strong as some families who may eat all their meals together all the time. We catch up on what is going on, we laugh, discuss any appointments or meetings coming up in the next day or two, talk about grades and school and just have a good time. When there is not much going on, we will just sit down and watch a movie together while eating and that is another great memory to notch in my memory book!

The following recipes are some of my family's favorite meals for me to fix. Some of them may end up taking a few minutes more for you to fix for yourself until you learn how to do them, but once you do, if you like them, you will learn to LOVE them!!

1. Hamburger & French Fries

One of the easiest ways for me to fix a quick meal to is to thaw out some hamburgers or get those hamburgers already formed into patties, throw them in a pan, get out some buns and throw some fries on the side of the plate. However you like to fix your fries, baked or deep fried, they will still take about the same amount of time. By the time you get the fries done, you will have enough hamburgers done to feed your whole family or just about (depending on the size of your family).

2. Hot dogs and French Fries

Hot dogs and French fries are under the same concept. We like to use chili with beans out of a can on them. If you like onions, while cooking your hot dogs and cooking your fries, cut up your onions, get out your condiments and open up your chili and get it heated up. Make sure you got thawed out buns and there you go!

3. Spaghetti with or without garlic bread

Now this is one of my family's very favorite meals ever! My son has been eating spaghetti ever since he could eat solid foods and would eat it once a week if I made it that often. For simplicity, make sure you have all of your ingredients out on the counter when you go to start cooking. Thawed out hamburger, your spaghetti noodles, onions ready for chopping if you like them in your spaghetti, any other veggies you like to add to your spaghetti, your garlic bread OR your bread and garlic spread if you like that with your meal as well. For us, making spaghetti is one of the least time consuming meal times ever because we all pitch in and we are cooking hamburger, spaghetti noodles and the garlic bread all at the same time so when it is time to start mixing and serving, everything is done and ready for eating NOW! Just throw it all together, put it on a plate and go spend time with your family for some quality dinner time!

4. Homemade Lasagna

Yes folks that is what I said; HOMEMADE Lasagna! I have gotten the recipe I use for my homemade lasagna down to a science! We use basic lasagna noodles, just whatever spaghetti sauce we fancy that night, ricotta cheese, parmesan cheese and mozzarella cheese. We do not always use hamburger in our lasagna but it can be fixed during the same time the lasagna noodles are being prepared. If you like extra vegetable added to your lasagna, you cut them up and get them prepared while you are cooking the hamburger and lasagna noodles too.

From the time your noodles are done, you are on a mission to get the noodles placed in your pan before they start sticking all together and making a big mess of themselves. I automatically run cold water over our noodles but then I run a constant slow trickle of water over them the whole time I am making my layers of sauce, noodles, ricotta, mozzarella and parmesan.

Make sure you are pre-heating your oven as you are cooking your noodles and your hamburger. Your noodles should not take any more than between 8 and 15 minutes to cook and that should give your oven plenty of time to heat up. Making your layers should not take very long since you are on a time limit. I call it 'the countdown to the noodles sticking together'. If they sit for very long and I mean not long at all, more than a few minutes, the noodles will start sticking together and they are usually fairly hard to separate after that.

Now when you layer, I say have fun. Do it how you think it should be done; what looks good to you; tasty and yummy! But just to give some of you an idea of how you can do it, the following is how I layer my lasagna:

a) First put some spaghetti sauce in the bottom of the pan.

b) Secondly put a layer of lasagna noodles on that layer of sauce.

c) Thirdly put a layer of ricotta cheese, thick but not thick; to your liking, all depending on how much you like ricotta cheese.

d) Fourth step put a layer of mozzarella cheese on top of the ricotta cheese.

e) Fifth step put a layer of parmesan cheese on top of the mozzarella cheese. The amount you put on just all depends on your own liking of parmesan cheese.

f) Now, you start all over again but putting sauce, and all of your layers again, in whatever order you choose, same, or not.

Once you are done with your layering all that is left to do is to put your pan in the oven, cook for anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes, long enough for the cheeses to melt and for it to be heated all the way through and you have just made a fairly quick and easy HOMEMADE lasagna dinner!

5. Stuffed Shells with or without a side dish

This is a fairly quick and easy dish to fix, way simpler than the lasagna dish. For Stuffed shells you need to buy you the large shells in the macaroni department (spaghetti and noodles isle). You need spaghetti sauce, ricotta cheese, some mozzarella cheese if you like and some parmesan cheese, again, if you like.

With this dish, you just cook your shells in a pot of boiling water for about 10 minutes or so till tender but not too tender. Take them out, rinse them in cool water to chill just enough for you to be able to handle them to fill them.

Now you can go several ways with your filling. You can put just the ricotta cheese in your shells and then cover them with mozzarella cheese and parmesan cheese (optional completely) or you can mix up your ricotta cheese and mozzarella cheese and top with parmesan cheese or any other number of variations. You can even throw in some chopped up veggies that you diced up while waiting on the shells to cook up. Try it several different ways to find just what you like!

You last steps are to put spaghetti or even tomato sauce on the bottom of your pan (with shells I like to use my glass pans), put your stuffed shells on that layer of sauce and then place more sauce on top. If you like to make it even cheesier, try putting some cheese on top. Any form of mozzarella and parmesan or any other types of cheeses to suit your fancy!

Cook for about 10 to 20 minutes depending on your oven temperature and timing (most have some form of variations) and there you go, quick and easy homemade stuffed shells! This meal is good enough to eat without side dishes but some favorites to go with this are broccoli splashed with butter or garlic or both or any other types of veggies that you like.

Well I hope you have enjoyed part one of my two part series of the Five Quick and Easy Dinner Meals. If you enjoyed this article I hope you take a gander at part two of this two part series with five more quick and easy meals for you and your family!